Little mic lies: Everyone does it

No matter how accomplished a singer is, backing tapes are an essential part of most live, nationally televised musical performances -- including those at the Super Bowl last Sunday.

That's what music-business veterans say in the wake of Jennifer Hudson's dramatic performance of "The Star Spangled Banner" before the National Football League's marquee event, which drew 98.7 million viewers. Afterward, the pregame show's producer, Rickey Minor, said Hudson used a backing track, as did singer Faith Hill, who performed "America the Beautiful."

Hudson's publicist, Jessica Kolstad, said Tuesday that the 27-year-old Chicago native "was singing live to a backing track. Her microphone was on, and she was singing live to the backing track at the request of the producers."

But once the decision is made to use a backing tape, that's mostly what the TV audience hears. Only those around Hudson would have heard her live singing.

The Super Bowl has routinely required performers to tape their performances in advance of the broadcast. The performers have the option to sing live but are encouraged to use the backing track to avoid technical glitches.

"The Super Bowl performances are all on tape," said Hank Neuberger, a Grammy-winning producer who is supervisor of the broadcast audio for the Grammy Awards telecast. Minor is music director of the Grammys in addition to his duties as producer of the pregame entertainment at the Super Bowl.

Neuberger said not only Hudson and Hill recorded their performances in advance, but so did halftime performers Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Only Springsteen's vocals were live, he said.

"There is no way you can set up a full band in five minutes with microphones, get all the settings right and expect to get quality sound," Neuberger said. "The Super Bowl has been doing that for years with virtually all the bands."

Subpar singers or dance-oriented pop acts often resort to lip-synching to carry live performances; in recent years artists such as Ashlee Simpson, Madonna and Britney Spears have all dealt with controversies about their use of backing tracks in live performances.

But Hudson is a masterful vocalist with a multi-octave range. Her Super Bowl performance was newsworthy in part because of tragic recent events; her mother, brother and nephew were killed Oct. 24 in their Englewood home, and Sunday marked her first public appearance since then. She gave a poised, emotionally charged performance that was widely praised by viewers, though Internet blogs and message boards lit up with surprised and disappointed reactions when Minor revealed afterward that she was singing to a backing track.

"It's not fraudulent; it's the opposite of fraud," Neuberger said. "It's not like Milli Vanilli," referring to the pop duo who won a best-new-artist Grammy that was later rescinded after it was revealed that the two didn't actually sing on their debut album. "This was a case where Jennifer Hudson is the singer, and it was a case of the artist giving the audience her best under adverse conditions."

Neuberger said a similar strategy was employed by the classical quartet including violinist Itzhak Perlman and cellist Yo-Yo Ma that played to a recorded track at the presidential inauguration last month.

"There were too many variables keeping the instruments in tune while playing outside in cold weather," he said. "You can't control the environment, so the smart decision is to record the performance and play along with it. With Jennifer Hudson, if she goes out there, they set up the microphones, the music starts and something goes wrong -- she can't hear herself, the microphone doesn't work -- she's in trouble.

"The performance is going to suffer. You only have a certain amount of time. It's too big of an event to risk something going wrong."

Still, what about alerting viewers that portions of a broadcast have been prerecorded if backing tapes are being used? Live sound mixers say the practice is so commonplace that such disclaimers aren't necessary.

"C'mon, it's a given," Neuberger said. "Television and music are not always a happy marriage. It's hard to present music of the highest quality on television, and you want the audience to hear an artist at their best. It's not like anybody paid to see Milli Vanilli sing, and found out later they aren't even on the recording, let along singing onstage."

Neuberger says the exception to the rule is the Grammy telecast, where all the vocals and most of the backing instrumentation are live. Hudson is scheduled to sing Sunday at the national televised awards ceremony, and Neuberger says she will perform without a backing track.

"We have more time to set up and make sure everything is right," he said. "We commit more resources to doing this live than any other show. By comparison the Super Bowl has limited resources to deal with adverse conditions, so using a backing tape is the right call."